PITTSBURGH — So many words have been written about Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and Senate hopeful John Fetterman’s tattoos. The imposingly statured, baldheaded 53-year-old former mayor of Braddock, Pa., has ink of the Pittsburgh borough’s Zip code and the dates of every violent death that took place there while he served in office, as well as a Nine Inch Nails lyric: “I will make you hurt.”
But what about his wife’s tattoos?
“This is the most recent one,” says Gisele Barreto Fetterman, 40, pulling her sleeve up past her wrist in an East Liberty coffee shop to reveal a tiny outline of a bird.
“This is from a very famous Brazilian poem,” she says of the bird’s significance. The poem is “I Fly,” by Mário Quintana. Translated from the Brazilian American second lady of Pennsylvania’s native Portuguese, it reads: “Those who would / My path deny / Are bound to falter / And I to fly.” Elsewhere, she has some hearts, an equality sign and on her arm, a word: “Soft.”
A thick skin isn’t soft. Gisele could use a thicker skin these days, as she helps John fight one of the toughest midterm races of the cycle. It all gets to her: the attacks from her husband’s opponent, former TV doctor Mehmet Oz; the disdainful comments she hears from people who fixate on her past as an undocumented immigrant. Piled onto that are all the injustices of life in America in 2022. Oh, and also the puppies.
The day before, Jezebel published a report that Oz’s medical experiments caused the deaths of more than 300 dogs, including puppies, and “inflicted significant suffering on them and the other animals used in experiments.” The Fettermans are dog lovers, so in a twisted sort of way this report was a gift to their campaign: an opportunity to call their opponent a puppy killer.
“It’s a profile of a really dangerous person, you know?” she says. “They said that the screams of the puppies were heard through the closed door.” (Although Oz oversaw the experiments in these allegations, which took place between 2002 and 2004, there is no evidence that he personally abused the animals.)
Politics is mean and hard, and Gisele — soft Gisele, who cries three times over the course of this interview — had no choice but to get good at it: After her husband suffered a stroke four days before the Pennsylvania primary election last spring, she stepped up and became his surrogate, delivering his acceptance speech and campaigning across the state.
“It’s easy because I know his message, and I love him, and I know how good he is, and I get to tell that to people,” she says.
Later on this day, after a visit to an abortion clinic and a shift at the Free Store 15104, her mutual aid project, she will do an interview with KDKA, a local TV station, about the puppy allegations. Reached for comment by KDKA political editor Jon Delano, the Oz campaign’s senior spokesman Barney Keller responded: “Who is Gisele? Is she running for something?”
No. But, kind of.
She almost didn’t see it happen. But the morning of May 13, the couple were getting into the car to head to a campaign event.
“I was paying attention, and the corner of his mouth just dropped for one second,” she says. “His speech didn’t change. His energy didn’t change. Nothing else, other than a drop for a second. And I just knew that wasn’t a natural movement of the mouth.” She insisted that he go to the nearest hospital in Lancaster, Pa. He resisted. But once they arrived, doctors removed a clot from his brain and installed a pacemaker in his heart, which had been beating in atrial fibrillation, when the heart’s top chambers are out of sync with the bottom chambers.
Four days later, it was Gisele, not John, giving a victory speech.
“I now have one more thing I get to hold over him. I mean, I saved his life, right?” she said in the speech, making light of what was later revealed to be a near-deadly stroke. “I will never let him live that down.” Her sunny demeanor papered over the worry that had consumed her for days — and there was some anger, too. Fetterman had been diagnosed with cardiomyopathy in 2017 but had neglected his health and not returned for follow-up appointments.
“We have to be okay with accepting that we can feel all the different things at the same time,” she says. “So it’s okay to be mad at him, and to really love him, and to be proud of him. It’s okay that they all live together.”
The next few weeks were a whirlwind. Gisele had to tend to John’s recovery, while taking care of their three children (Karl, 13, Grace, 11, and August, 8), and also acting as John’s voice — quite literally, as his speech was affected by the stroke. (John stumbles on his words occasionally and uses closed captioning for interviews. His campaign did not make him available to be interviewed for this story.) She campaigned for him and kept news outlets updated on his condition. “Just keeping the seat warm for him,” she told NBC.
“Had he been married to anybody else, I think his recovery and ability to stay in this race would have been drastically diminished,” says Brit Crampsie, a Pennsylvania political consultant who is not working with the Fetterman campaign. “Not many people have a surrogate like Gisele in their pocket, should they fall ill.”
Nevertheless, the couple were criticized: John for being absent, and Gisele for — according to detractors — not being more forthcoming about his condition.
Over in Ohio, one of the few women who could relate to Gisele’s situation was paying close attention.
“I was watching what she was doing and thinking, this takes a lot of guts because on Day 1, she knew she was going to get a lot of criticism for it,” says Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and the wife of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Schultz is also the author of “ … And His Lovely Wife,” a memoir of her time supporting her husband on the trail, during which she had to take a leave of absence from her job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer to avoid a conflict of interest.
“This idea that somehow she should not be speaking in his stead — I don’t know who would have been more qualified to do so,” says Schultz. “It’s more than just a commitment to the personal success and the ambitions of her husband, right? If she shares his values, and we have every reason to think she does, she also shares his concern about who should be in the Senate.”
Schultz knows how this goes. Political wives are caricatures in the media: Either they’re the meek stand-by-your-man types who appear onstage when a mistress has surfaced, or they’re power-hungry lightning rods for criticism.
“In some ways, we really are still considered either props or problems,” says Schultz.
But the things that previously could make a candidate’s wife a “problem” have mostly been assets for Gisele. Her previous immigration status gives her a national platform to advocate for “dreamers” and asylum seekers. She’s a medical-marijuana patient (thanks to lingering pain from a childhood injury) who can speak personally about cannabis legalization, a popular part of her husband’s platform. She eschewed the lieutenant governor’s mansion, opting to remain in the converted auto garage they have renovated into their Braddock home, but opened up the mansion’s backyard pool to children from underprivileged backgrounds. She charmingly referred to herself by her title’s acronym — Second Lady of Pennsylvania, or SLOP.
Aside from being the target of anti-immigrant rhetoric, the thing Gisele is criticized for the most, she says, is her eyebrows — thick and dark, like Frida Kahlo’s but separated in the middle. Many women would pay good money to have them.
“I don’t think that Gisele would ever think about what a politician’s wife is supposed to be,” says Kristen Michaels, her close friend and partner in For Good PGH, their nonprofit organization. (According to tax filings, Gisele does not draw a salary from the endeavor.) “She is so her own person.”
Among Democrats, these characteristics have made her popular enough for some to openly wonder whether she should be the candidate instead. That sentiment turned somewhat more fraught as it entwined with worries about her husband’s health.
“I like your hubby, but I wish I could vote for you,” wrote one Twitter follower.
“Gisele vs Oz is the debate I want to see,” wrote another.
Some even think of the Fettermans as a Bill-and-Hillary-style “two for the price of one.” The Fetterman campaign has capitalized on her popularity, selling “I’m With Gisele’s Husband” T-shirts with the couple’s silhouettes — and John’s head cropped out, a running joke on Gisele’s social media (she’s petite and likes to show off her shoes). An article on the site Latino Rebels bore the headline “Gisele Fetterman’s Husband Campaigns for Senate in Pennsylvania.”
“If she wanted to run for office, she would have a strong following and a decent fundraising first quarter,” Crampsie says.
“It’s very kind, but it’s not for me,” Gisele says. “It’s an awful, mean and cruel world, and my heart cannot take it.”
It was her father, actually, who was “always running for something,” says Gisele, scrolling through her phone to produce an old photo of herself as a baby in Brazil, being held by people wearing campaign shirts that bore her father’s name. In that photo, “He was running for deputado estadual, which would be state deputy” — equivalent to a state representative in the United States. Delfim Aguiar Almeida ran for that office multiple times, most recently in 2010, but did not win any of his elections. He has affiliated with both left- and right-wing parties during his career, which also included journalism and unelected community leadership in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone.
“We never really talked about it because I’ve always hated politics,” says Gisele. “I think he thinks, like, ‘Oh, she followed in my footsteps.’ I absolutely did not.”
Her parents divorced when she was young; her mother brought her and her brother to the United States when Gisele was 7. It had been summer when they left Brazil, and she arrived wearing canvas sneakers and a light jacket, surprised by the chill of New York winters. It was a few years before another reveal — that her family was undocumented.
Her mother taught her she “can’t really draw any attention to yourself, right? Like, you can’t get in trouble. You can’t do these things because, you know, we are undocumented. And what this means is that we can be deported at any time,” Gisele says. Her mother cleaned houses. They furnished their Queens apartment with things found on the curb. She got her green card in 2004.
In 2007, while working as a nutritionist, Gisele was on a yoga retreat in Costa Rica when a magazine story about newly elected mayor John Fetterman trying to revive a neglected steel town caught her eye. She wrote him a handwritten letter with her business card enclosed to ask if she could come visit and maybe help.
“When I read about the city that had been abandoned, to me, I wanted to see what that looked like,” she says. “In Brazil, cities don’t get abandoned.”
What followed was a bit like a rom-com plot. The mayor gave her a tour of the city. A year later, he proposed.
Later, it was the memory of seeing all the perfectly good, discarded things on the streets of New York that gave her the idea to open the Free Store, a place for Braddock residents to come for anything from food to toys. Other free stores have opened across the state with her help.
When Breanna Adams, 32, of Erie, Pa., reached out to Gisele for advice on starting one in her own community in 2015, she personally coached her through the process, Adams says. After the store opened, the couple brought donations of brand-new children’s clothing the next time they were in Erie.
“She literally came in carrying boxes,” says Adams. She “was just like: ‘Hey, I’m in town. Can we stop by?’ And kicked off her shoes and got right to work folding things and putting things away.” The store wasn’t even open at the time of her visit, says Adams, so she wasn’t doing it for an audience.
In Gisele’s Braddock store hangs a sign that reads, “Wherever you came from, however you got here, we’re SO glad to see you.” But the store has also been the location for some tense exchanges.
“I had a gentleman who came to the Free Store for food, and I gave him like, a couple of meals from Costco,” she says, “And then my mom called, and I answered in Portuguese, and then he made a really disparaging comment.” He was a veteran and told her that “your people” had taken all the jobs. It wasn’t as frightening as the time she was followed out of a Pittsburgh Aldi by a woman calling her the n-word — an incident that made headlines in the United States and Brazil — but she’s tearing up at the memory.
“I don’t want to ever get to a place where it doesn’t affect me because then I feel like I’ve lost a part of who I am,” she says. “I’m okay crying at least once a day. Sometimes more.”
In a way, the walk to a Pittsburgh abortion clinic is familiar. Teenage Gisele once accompanied a friend who needed an abortion. On their way to the appointment, the pair encountered antiabortion protesters. The friend’s pregnancy ended in miscarriage, Gisele says, but the memory of making their way inside with the protesters yelling at them stuck with her, and inspired her to volunteer as a clinic escort while earning a degree at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, protectively shuffling women through the shouting gantlets.
There are only three protesters in front of the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center today, but a staff member tells her that on the weekends, there are often about 40. The protesters sit in foldable chairs across the street and eye Gisele up as she walks toward the door. One holds up a sign with a picture of a baby that reads “I love you mommy don’t leave without ME!”
“It’s so hard to understand where inside of [them] that cruelty comes from,” she says.
The Fetterman campaign has repeatedly pressed Oz on his stance on abortion, holding “Women for Fetterman” (or, “Fetterwomen”) rallies and emphasizing abortion access in campaign advertising. Oz has said he is antiabortion, with exceptions for rape, incest and if the mother’s life is at risk.
Gisele’s three children were born via water birth, at her home. She wanted to feel all the feelings. But she doesn’t want other women to have to. “Forcing a child to have to give birth,” she says, referring to a recent, nationally debated example. “I can’t wrap my mind around that mentality.”
Inside the clinic, after opening her purse for security (“There’s lots of snacks in there,” she says), she makes her way through waiting rooms and exam rooms, guided by Nikkole Terney, the center’s abortion care director.
“Since the Dobbs decision, a lot of people got their abortions canceled in Ohio,” says Terney, referring to the recent Supreme Court ruling. “We’ve seen almost double our monthly numbers.”
“What’s the farthest you’ve had someone come?” asks Gisele.
“Tennessee, one from Mississippi recently,” says Terney.
“Literally anywhere west of us and south of us,” says Rogelio Garcia II, the center’s director of security and safety. Downstairs, where volunteers counsel patients, the phones constantly ring.
Soft is what Gisele brings to a campaign that is only getting harder. In the weeks since her visit to the abortion clinic, Fetterman’s lead has narrowed. The candidate was criticized for using closed captions and fumbling some words in an interview with NBC News; disability advocates condemned coverage of the candidate as ableist. On Twitter, Gisele said that she, too, uses closed captioning to help with her ADHD, and pivoted to the impact the coverage would have on others: “Close to 15% of the US population identify as hard of hearing and may need accommodations.”
“I see her as outward-focused. The candidate has to talk about himself,” says Schultz. “And she turns to shine the light on people they’re meeting, people who are gathering around them.”
John is an introvert — “awkwardly shy,” says Gisele. So she compensates for that with gregariousness and hugs. Three times in the conversation, she refers to herself as a Pisces — “Pisces are sensitive and emotional.” Later, she would try to encourage this reporter to write a story about a child she met who needs a bone-marrow transplant.
If her husband wins, Gisele will find herself with a much larger platform for the causes that she holds dear, which center on meeting people’s basic needs and rechanneling food and goods that would otherwise be wasted. She says someone has already approached her about opening a free store in D.C.
“A lot of things that she cares about are more appropriate for a federal stage,” says Crampsie. “I know immigration is a big one for her, and as lieutenant governor John didn’t really have a big say in that, so maybe we’ll see more from her.”
“I know that she will be thoughtful about where and how she spends her time and energy, and she will support John, as she always has,” says Michaels, her friend. “She’ll make her own path.”
On her way out of the abortion clinic, Gisele meets with two volunteers to thank them for their work. “I escorted a long time ago, and I’m ready to get back into it,” she says, quietly adding her number to the clinic’s volunteer database. “Phones, whatever you need me to do.”
Beatriz Miranda in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.
